"Most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated."

Wrote P. J. O'Rourke in his 1992 book "Parliament of Whores."

I ran across that quote this morning because I was looking up the word "news" in the OED. It's the last of the quotes listed under the definition, "The report or account of recent (esp. important or interesting) events or occurrences, brought or coming to one as new information; new occurrences as a subject of report or talk; tidings... esp. such information as published or broadcast."

I got interested in the history of the word "news" as I was reading "How ‘pink slime’ journalism exploits our faith in local news/The disappearance of local news outlets has been weaponized by partisan interests" by Ryan Zickgraf (in WaPo). That begins:

The 17th-century word “courant,” which once meant “newspaper,” is obsolete, according to Merriam-Webster, except in the rare case of the title of a periodical. Papers with that moniker in their masthead got grandfathered in because they were founded hundreds of years ago. Hearing something called “courant” today, I imagine a time-tested media institution anchored in a specific city or region, such as Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, which is a decade older than the United States government....

"Of all human failings, he found humorlessness the funniest. Back then, the political left was so earnest about saving the world..."

"... that there was no room for laughter, which denoted a lack of earnestness. Self-deprecating humor, P.J.’s trademark, wasn’t allowed because it could undermine the mission. Saving the world was no laughing matter. One titter and the whole edifice could come crashing down. Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom. A sense of humor, much less self-awareness, are not traits found in cults of personality. If Tucker Carlson has said anything advertently funny, witty or self-knowing from his bully pulpit, I missed it. Maybe you had to be there."

Writes Christopher Buckley in "P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor" (NYT).

 Did you chuckle at "myrmidons of MAGAdom"? It's got a nattering-nabobs-of-nepotism air about it.

Goodbye to P.J. O'Rourke.

His death is reported here.

My son John collects some of his quotes at Facebook. Excerpt:

"Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it."

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." 

"Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay."

Here's something of his that I quoted in May 2016:

"I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."

"Trump wasn’t elected because Clinton was cordially detested. What American presidential candidate since George Washington hasn’t been?"

"She was dull on the stump. But if dullness were politically fatal, the entire American political system would have been in the cemetery with President Harrison since 1841. (He gave a two-hour inaugural address in freezing rain, then caught a cold and died a month later.) Clinton’s 'popular vote' victory was and is inconsequential. America, since its founding, has had a devolved system of voting for the president that eschews nationwide first-past-the-post to give more obscure regions (our Scotlands) a greater say than weight of population would allow. She and Trump knew the rules. The cheating would have been different in a different game. Russian electoral interference was doubtless factual but doubtfully culpable. I’ve spent time in Russia. The idea that the Russians could fine-tune America’s enormously complex machinery of election is … I’ve driven Russian cars. And there’s no use blaming Trump’s election on the rise of populism. 'Populism' is an epithetic catch-all in use whenever the ideas popular with the good and the great aren’t popular.... America is what you get when you turn a random horde of people loose in a vast and various space. Some came here on the make, some on the run, some were dragged here involuntarily as slaves, some were chased here by poverty, oppression or bigotry and some were here already and were defeated by disease and demographics until they became foreigners in their own country. The bunch of us have never got along...."

From "Trump v Biden: PJ O’Rourke on why this US election is the craziest yet/Why on earth isn’t Joe Biden set for a landslide? The inimitable political commentator takes a ringside seat at the election circus" by (obviously) P.J. O'Rourke writing in the Times of London.

"I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises," said P.J. O'Rourke.

"It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."

P.J. O'Rourke taps into the collective memory of the Baby Boomers.

He's talking about his new book — a memoir — called "The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault)(And I’ll Never Do It Again)."

"Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm..."

"... was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."

Said Alec Baldwin to Elaine Stritch after she described having "an orgasm for the first time in my life" on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ("You know, that big scene? ‘Our son,’ he yells in my face, ‘is dead.’ And I went ‘No!’ At the height of my force, I said no to him.")

That's in the transcript of the May 13, 2013 episode of Baldwin's podcast "Here's The Thing." Here's the audio, with Stritch doing a very dramatic yelling of "Nooooo!" She was 88 at the time, suffering from diabetes, and a year and a month away from her death.

"After all, where would we be without the knowledge that Democrats are pinko-communist flag-burners who want to tax churches and use the money to fund abortions..."

"... so they can use the fetal stem cells to create pot-smoking lesbian ATF agents who will steal all the guns and invite the UN to take over America? Voters have to decide whether we’d be better off electing Republicans, those hateful, assault-weapon-wielding maniacs who believe that George Washington and Jesus Christ incorporated the nation after a Gettysburg reenactment and that the only thing wrong with the death penalty is that it isn’t administered quickly enough to secular humanist professors of Chicano studies."

From the amicus brief of the Cato Institute and P.J. O'Rourke in Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, the Supreme Court case that asks the question "Can a state government criminalize political statements that are less than 100% truthful?" (PDF, via Metafilter.)

The brief is full of funny things (along with actual free-speech doctrinal analysis). I laughed out loud at footnote 15:

P.J. O'Rouke tells you guys to stop wearing shorts.

I've been saying it for years. (Click the "men in shorts" tag.) But here's P.J.:

Comfortable means “easy.” So: Nothing’s easier than matching a pair of pants and a jacket that look exactly alike. I’ve got a closet full of blue suits and black wing tips. Any tie goes with a white shirt. I can get dressed in the dark. And—what with blinding hangovers from drinking on airplanes to soften the shock of first-class seats filled with graying, jowly urchins—I often do.

The kid-who-stayed-40-years-too-long-on-the-playground look doesn’t inspire trust. If dressing up as a third grader is your idea of how to treat yourself, what’s your idea of how to treat me?

What exactly did Rush Limbaugh apologize for?

I'm rereading the "Statement from Rush":

... I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke....

My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.

The apology is clearly for the "wrong words... choice of words... word choices."  That's very precise, stated 3 times. He does not apologize for the "analogy." What analogy? There is only one analogy that I can see, and that is the analogy of Sandra Fluke to a prostitute (because she, as he put it, thought "American citizens should pay for these social [i.e., sexual] activities").

So what are the words — plural: words — that he apologizes for using? There's "slut." That's one. What's the other? If it's "prostitute," then how can stand by the analogy?

By the way, the prostitute analogy is used all the time in politics. I think of P.J. O'Rourke's book "Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government." They're all prostitutes! Well, O'Rourke's word choice was "whores." I'm sure Limbaugh didn't mean to imply that he's sorry he used such nice words. Prostitute is positively stuffy compared to whore.

And as for "slut"... recently, women have been embracing the word slut.

I'm going to monitor the Rush Limbaugh show when it comes on in a couple hours. Wouldn't it be a kick in the teeth if he said that he only apologized for his word choice, the "wrong words" were "slut" and "prostitute," and the better word, the word he should have chosen, was: whore. And: They're all whores!

I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.... I meant a personal attack on all the Democrats in Congress!